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Other email material by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood:

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Finding Email Addresses

Why I Don't Like Electronic Greeting Cards

Email Bibliography

Humorous looks at email:

The Dark Side of Web Publishing

Email vs. Letters

Hyphenate or not -- Email or E-mail?

Overcome Email Overload with Eudora 5

Quick Tips for Overcomeing Email Overload

Excerpted from Overcome Email Overload with Eudora 5
Copyright © 2001 Kaitlin Duck Sherwood


  1. If your email program has tools called rules or filters , use them to automatically prioritize your inbox. If possible, use rules to assign each message a category (or label ) based on what group the sender belongs to. If you assign the categories so that they sort in the same order as their probable importance, then you can easily sort your inbox to list messages in roughly the order you want to deal with them.
  2. If your email program allows it, put buttons in the toolbar for moving the selected message(s) to a final resting place and for moving to the next message. If you are done with a message, press the first button. If you still need to do something with a message, press the second button.
  3. Use filters/rules to assign junk email a very low-priority category or move it to another mailbox. (But do not delete junk email automatically! Your rules will make mistakes sometimes.)
  4. Unsubscribe from as many mailing lists as you can.
  5. Get and use a free email account for all transactions with retailers or the public.
  6. Use formal language and end messages with "No Reply Needed" to discourage responses.
  7. As much as possible, reply to only the sender instead of to everybody and use BCC instead of CC.
  8. Don't forward any message that asks you to forward it to everyone you know. Those messages are almost always hoaxes or out of date. You might get lots of messages back telling you so.
  9. If someone sends you messages you don't want (like hoaxes or jokes), ask them ( very politely) to stop. Otherwise, they will send you more.
  10. Be sure to provide adequate context for your messages. Quote previous messages carefully and watch for references to people or things that you don't mention in the message.
  11. Save and reuse responses to questions that you get frequently.
  12. Make your emotional tone as obvious and explicit as you can.
  13. Use styled text infrequently. If your messages are too pretty, people might think you don't have enough to do.
  14. Discuss only one issue per message. People frequently forget about all but the first or last question.
  15. Visit http://www.oeo.webfoot.com for more resources.
  16. Buy and read a book in the Overcome Email Overload series.